1 EM: You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky -- and I’m joined in the studio by Stephanie Billman. SB: Hi! EM: Stephanie and I used to work together at WNYC. I would say we were fellow geeks at a place where there were a lot of nerds but not a lot of geeks – would you agree? SB: Yeah, I totally agreed with that. EM: I remember people were amused that I had action figures at my desk. Did you get comments about your Doctor Who stuff? SB: All the time. Someone saw my picture of David Tennant and was like, is that one of the Beatles? No, it’s not. EM: So Stephanie pitched me this idea about Fan Fiction – first the title of the email was Fan Fiction (Don’t Judge) which I loved so much that I decided immediately was going to be the title of this episode! And before we get to your pitch, I should say I was always skeptical of doing an episode on fan fiction. I have to admit I had never read any fanfiction but I assumed most of it was really bad. It’s an insult, like a lot of people said Game of Thrones this season felt like fanfic meaning it feels like the characters were fulfilling the fan’s greatest wishes regardless of whether it makes sense for the story. SB: Fan service. EM: Fan service, yeah. And that’s the other thing too, I was telling you I struggled to write screenplays for ten years and I took all these writing classes, read all these books on story structure – and I got all this brutal feedback. And I have a new appreciation of how hard it is to write and so I always thought fan fiction was people saying I’m going to write a story, I’m going to put it on the Internet, and everyone tell me it’s great because I don’t want any criticism. SB: And there is that, there’s stories where author's note say no criticism, kudos only, kudos and positive comments only -- but there’s an equal number of really quality fan fiction – of really quality writing. 2 EM: In fact, you told me about something that totally tanked my stereotype of fan fiction – the role of the beta? What is a beta? SM: So a beta is something you can find online and there’s a whole system where you can read your story, either they read it as you’re going along as you’re writing or the finished product. And they can read it for content, they can read for grammar or both, it can be a collaboration, writers collaborating with the beta, or providing feedback at the end of your story. EM: So why don’t they just call them editors? SM: Because at the beginning of fan fiction, there were so many people in the computer industry so beta is like the testing phase. EM: Ah that’s cool! SM: And that’s where the actual terminology came from. EM: Do the betas get paid? SB: No, it’s totally voluntary, it’s totally free, and the ones I enjoy the most are the ones that use betas and particularly use the same betas over and over again. EM: So when you told me about betas that sold me on this idea but you also pointed out something that should’ve been obvious to me that most movies, most writer’s rooms get made by straight white guys and bring that perspective to these stories and fan fiction because it's open to anybody completely changes our perspective on how these stories and that’s where I was like – tell me more! SB: I’ve always been in the geek space, so I was a huge fan of Star Wars growing up, so when I would go to the comic stores when I was younger, I would often be the only person of color and often the only girl in that space so coming into fan fiction it’s really great and refreshing to see all these perspectives that are not straight white males – no offense to you, Eric. EM: None taken! SB: It’s lovely! 3 EM: All right, so we talked to a bunch of people as well. We studies Francesca Coppa. She’s a professor at Muhlenberg College and she studies fan fiction. She wrote a book called The Fan Fiction Reader. FC: So I myself have been a fan girl since I was 12, so I have some cred in that area too. EM: She was totally fascinating. I thought fan fiction as we know it started with Star Trek but she said it started over a hundred years ago with Sherlock Holmes. FC: And almost right away people started writing more homes. And they did a lot of other things that we associate with modern fandom like they had a campaign. I mean he killed Holmes off after the tenth story. And people you know wore black armbands and they protested in the streets and they wrote letters and they made him bring him back. EM: And so then there was this worldwide trend of people writing stories about Holmes and Watson. SB: Yeah and back then those stories were mostly written by men so there wasn’t that stigma that’s currently attached to fan fiction. EM: It was like a gentlemanly pursuit? SB: Exactly and now it’s mostly written by predominantly by women and read by women as well. EM: Yeah and then also Francesca pointed out there’s a difference between fan fiction then and now. FC: We’re only having a special episode about this because we’re in a place with intellectual property which is a very recent phenomenon where suddenly this very natural making stories out of other people's stories is being legislated. Only special people are allowed to tell stories out of our common culture at least in this legal sense. But fans are saying well but this is the human activity we want to tell more stories and you kind of can't stop us. Oh it's a kind of illegal act but it's a profoundly human act. EM: And then of course we get to modern fan fiction with Star Trek. FC: We still know those original women who kind of built Star Trek fandom right. Oh there's a number of them but many of them were in fact professional science fiction 4 writers basically like science fiction book fandom kind of felt that women science fiction writers like Star Trek kind of too much. And for the wrong reasons which is by the way something people always tell women we like the story too much and for the wrong reasons. EM: And when she says the wrong reasons is that because the women writing fan fiction are more interested in the relationship between the characters and not the big sci-fi high concept idea? SB: yeah, I mean with fan fiction you can explore the relationships you don’t have time on a movie or TV show. EM: And the thing that fan fiction is known for is putting characters that are supposedly straight in a relationship but the most famous pairing of course is Spock and Kirk. SB: Or Spirk. EM: Spirk? I just found that out recently their couple name Is Spirk. SB: Laughs EM: And the other thing that’s interesting the women that Francesca is talking about, the women who started modern fan fiction were called the fore smutters based on fore mothers. FC: So they do about fore smutters is we praise the older women who had the courage of the dirtiness of their imaginations. They were smutty. SB: Francesca studies fan fiction but this is also personal for her as well. She was part of the generation that picked up the mantle after the fore smutters. FC: And we had to do it old school in the mail sign you need to get your mom to write you a check for a fan magazine and you had to go to it like a collector's shop and you had to go to a bookstore. Like you need e dot get a plane ticket to fly to the convention, or to get your mom to take you, or you needed a check to send way for the zine, you couldn’t do it if you were 13 years old unaided, but now you can online you can do it from your bedroom. 5 SB: Francesca and her writers and readers eventually created one of the popular clearinghouses for fan fiction called Archive of Our Own. FC: And so we started in 207 we started with a blank cursor of code, my friend. We designed it, and people started saying this is what we need. Do we have lawyers? Turns out fandom has lawyers. Do we have professors? We have professors. We had coders. We had all these women, and they were 99.9% women, come together and coders were like, since we’re building it from scratch let’s build it to do exactly what we want. EM: You suggested that we talk with Brita Lundin, who is part of this third generation of contemporary fan fiction readers and writers. SB: But she’s actually a writer for Riverdale. EM: Which is a – I keep calling it Dark Archie.